Aeroacoustics Simulation Around a Wind Turbine Blade Using Compressible LES and Linearized Euler Equations

Abstract

There is a strong need to investigate aerodynamic noise caused by large and fast rotating wind turbines, especially trailing edge and tip noise. This work constitutes the first part of a project which aims to simulate the broadband tip noise emitted when the wind turbine is in operation. Several aeroacoustics methods are analyzed and their suitability for a typical wind turbine blade is assessed. A stationary wind turbine blade in an incident flow with a large region of separated flow is studied. The surface pressure fluctuations are calculated using compressible Large-Eddy simulation (LES). The aerodynamic noise perceived in the far-field is predicted by simulating the propagation of the pressure perturbations using LES and Linearized Euler equations (LEE) in the near field and Kirchhoff’s integral method in the far-field. It was found that for the present wind turbine blade with a large region of separated flow and thus relatively large fluctuations, LES with a fine enough mesh and a third-order upwind scheme is able to compute the propagation of acoustic waves as accurately as LEE with higher order schemes and separate treatment of acoustic perturbations. The method described in this paper will be used in the future to analyze a full wind turbine blade with the aim of optimizing the tip shape for reduced noise emission.